After the Developmental State: Civil Society in Japan

The Japanese developmental state catapulted Japan into economic prominence. However, almost just as world attention focused on Japan's distinctive model, the era of the developmental state was drawing to a close. A generation of scholars has ably documented the story of Japan's developmental state by focusing on industrial policy. They chronicled how a strong bureaucracy buffered by insulation from politicians lay at the heart of the developmental state. As Joseph Wong points out in the introductory essay to this special issue, scholars have also argued that the developmental state contained within itself the seeds of its own dismantling.1Since the 1960s, formal powers had been stripped from the bureaucracy, leaving it increasingly dependent upon “administrative guidance” not legally enforceable.2By the late 1980s, the very success of the developmental state had eroded the powers of the bureaucracy to set industrial policy.